Last Night: An Evening with Jim Jarmusch at Cantor Film Center

The Limits of Control hits theaters in selected cities on May 1.

The audio for this Pinewood Dialogue will probably be uploaded onto the Museum of Moving Image site soon. Here are the program notes-

Jim Jarmusch on The Limits of Control:

Do you favor intuition and imagination over analysis in terms of making a film, and experiencing one?

Definitely. Rather than over-think it, why not let the film wash over you? Whatever impression comes to your eyes and ears, well, anyone else will have a different one. There are people whose work I greatly respect, whose strength is analysis over intuition. I don't have that strength.

When you're watching a film, you're experiencing it for the first and perhaps only time.

Film is so directly related to music, because music passes before you in its own time signature, in its own moving landscape. It's not like looking at a painting, it's not like reading a book. Film and music are taking you along for a ride. There's something about how film unfolds in your consciousness and in your emotional response that is inherently musical.

Do you feel that The Limits of Control touches on the theme--in your work--of how much or how little to actually engage in your life? In terms of being present, and in the moment? As in Dead Man, for instance?

I'm not a religious person, but with Dead Man and before that, with a film that Mika Kaurismaki made in the Amazon that I worked on [1994's Tigero: A Film That Was Never Made], I started opening myself up to different philosophies; certainly, to Buddhism, not in any disciplined way but philosophically. These started hitting something inside me, that basic thing being that everything in the universe is one thing; and, the only thing we have is the present moment. There is a Buddhist Film Festival in Los Angeles, and I'm very happy that they have included Dead Man, Ghost Dog, and Broken Flowers. Although I'm not a practicing Buddhist, as an extension of that philosophy I try to practice tai chi and qui gong, which is something that entered the film also. In the film, when Isaach's character is performing tai chi to center himself, we take the sound away. That's the feeling you have when you do tai chi, or yoga, or any kind of meditation that involves your breathing and your body movement; everything else in the world starts to fall away. You are focusing on your movements in that moment.

The first thing we see in this movie is the quote from Rimbaud, as a jumping-off point; it points out that this character is going on a journey. Was that quote an inspiration for you in conceiving The Limits of Control?

I did want a jumping-off point, or, more accurately, a boat getting pushed out from the shore. But I didn't think of putting the quote on until the film was finished, so it wasn't an initial inspiration. And the fact is, though, that Le Bateau Ivre, as a poem, is a kind of metaphor for the derangement of the senses; an intentional disorientation of perception. So it's probably most pertinent at the very end of the film. The film's title comes from an essay "The Limits of Control" that William S. Burroughs wrote in the 1970s. The essay is mostly about language as a control mechanism; "words are still the principal instruments of control. Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine so far devised can operate without words, and any control machine which attempts to do so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control." While that inspired me to think about how we perceive things and how they are attempted to be controlled, I didn't use the essay directly for the film's content, but I did use the title.

Were there any movie inspirations? Tilda Swinton's character mentions a few titles overtly, and viewers might be put in mind of Antonioni...

It was more of, what would it be like if Jacques Rivette remade John Boorman's masterpiece Point Blank? Or what if Marguerite Duras remade Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai? [laughs] Antonioni looms large in my subconscious, so he's probably in there, but I wasn't thinking of him beforehand. I was obliquely thinking of Euro crime films from the 1970s and 1980s, like some of Francesco Rosi's work. These impressionistic inspirations drifted through my head, in terms of finding a style rather than imitating these movies. Most important, probably, was Point Blank; we named our production company PointBlank Films. Chris Doyle, Eugenio Caballero, and I studied Point Blank. Not in terms of its rhythm, but stylistically; frames within frames, objects framed by doors or windows or archways, shots that intentionally confuse as to what is exterior and what is interior due to reflective surfaces.

Turning from the story to the visuals, in terms of figuring out certain shots beforehand - or, not - did you do storyboarding and extensive location scouting?


I never do storyboarding; more and more, on my last few films, I don't use a shot list at all. So on this film, the location scouting was extremely important; I went to all the locations, first alone and then with Chris Doyle. He saw the locations and we started talking in a more general way about some movements of the camera and the way we saw the story being told. The locations would give us new ideas; when scouting, Chris is constantly disappearing down side streets, manically taking photographs. Some of those relate to the film he's working on, and some of those relate to these ongoing incredible collages that he makes. His mind is always racing. We often had ideas for shots, and we would sketch scenes with a digital camera, but rarely would we end up using that same shot in the film. Before we started shooting, Chris and I met for two weeks at a time over a period of several months and let ideas swirl around as we talked and talked and talked. Chris and I have known each other for years and always talked about working together on a feature. We worked together a few years ago on a music video for Jack White's band The Raconteurs, for their first single Steady as She Goes.